wrong arrivaltime?

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

Hello,

We are using your service to receive flight alerts from FlightAware and integrate to our system. Mostly we need Schedule and Actual departure and arrival time.

Today we received an alert for flight MAS112 and we saw that the actual arrival time stated is wrong. Please see the raw data that I retrieved from the log.

2015-06-01T14:27:08+00:00 INFO (6): Received following payload: {“long_desc”:“Malaysia Airlines #112 arrived at Zia Int’l (VGHS/DAC) at 20:10 BDT from WMKK/KUL (Kuala Lumpur Int’l)”,“short_desc”:“MAS112 arrived at VGHS/DAC from WMKK/KUL”,“summary”:“MAS112 arrived at VGHS/DAC from WMKK/KUL”,“eventcode”:“arrival”,“alert_id”:11600562,“flight”:{“ident”:“MAS112”,“aircrafttype”:“B738”,“origin”:“WMKK”,“destination”:“VGHS”,“filed_ete”:“03:30:00”,“route”:“”,“faFlightID”:“MAS112-1432981200-schedule-0084:0”,“reg”:“9MMXJ”,“filed_altitude”:0,“filed_airspeed_kts”:373,“filed_time”:1433110975,“filed_departuretime”:1433154000,“estimatedarrivaltime”:1433167856,“actualarrivaltime”:1433155256,“actualdeparturetime”:1433155256,“estimated_blockin_time”:0,“filed_blockin_time”:0,“actual_blockin_time”:0,“estimated_blockout_time”:0,“filed_blockout_time”:0,“actual_blockout_time”:0,“filed_arrivaltime”:1433166600}}

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If you check actualdeparturetime and actualarrivaltime you will find them that they are same! I have chatted with the support and he indicated that the time is unknown. But my question is that if a time is unknown then should not it be remain empty (or anything else).

Could you please comment on this?

Thanks.

2

actualarrivaltime == actualdeparturetime is a special indicator that means “result unknown” and specifies that we believe enough time has elapsed that the flight should have arrived, but we haven’t received any confirmed indication that it has.

actualarrivaltime == 0 indicates that the event has not yet occurred (has not arrived).

actualarrivaltime == -1 indicates that the flight has been cancelled.

3

Hi many thanks for the clarification. However in my opinion this a bit unusual as now there needs to be a validator for this field which depends on another field.

Any other field to indicate such unknown time or any specific value in this field would be much more meaningful and would make sense.

Do you have any plan to incorporate this in near future?